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I think the convention is not dependent on length, but on publishing: it's book titles that take italics, so if a story has only been printed as part of a collection, it takes quotes. Since creepypastas are in effect published on their own, I think they can be italicised.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
I far as I understand, those don't count as real works and should use quotations instead of italics:
- Episodes
- Named chapters/volumes
- Literature published exclusively in an anthology book
- Games exclusive to a jam collection.
- Short-feature films in a franchise
There are probably more, but the exact scope is kinda vague.
Edited by Amonimus TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup
^ I can see a potential (maybe existing?) Wiki Talk thread about this incoming.
So, something like the original single 4chan post for The Backrooms would count as a short story because it's part of a collection (the Backrooms work as a whole) right?
Art Museum Curator and frequent helper of the Web Original deprecation project
We have a "when in doubt, italicize" rule. How to Write an Example:
- Italicize "Long" Work Names: Most works, such as books, TV series, and music albums, are considered "long works", and their names should be italicized. Shorter works (or parts of works) like individual songs, TV show episodes, short stories, short poems, essays or chapters should be set in quotation marks. When in doubt, it is best to use italics.
So nobody is going to come for you for italicizing a creepypasta page, as it's still "somewhat correct" (and "more correct" than leaving it unformatted otherwise), but the "most correct" approach is to use quotes.
There are several wiki talk threads about this policy, e.g. this one
is probably one of the more productive, and discusses "edge cases" like novella.
^^ I wouldn't even italicize The Backrooms because it's not even really a work, at least from my understanding of what it is. It's just a bunch of people making posts, videos, wiki pages, etc. speculating about a made-up place with no unified canon.
^ In that case You could probably bring it up here.
I was only recently made aware that apparently the titles for short stories are marked with double quotes instead of italics
. note
I wish to ask for clarification on the practice(?). Is it just those labelled as a Short Story that are to be formatted as such, or should a word count be considered?
I ask this because I'm interested in/been making work pages for creepypastas, some of which can be quite short. Both The Storm (Arav Dagli) and When the Storm Came are about 5 minutes each, while stuff like Laughing Jack takes about 10 minutes to read note , and I've always been formatting them with italics. Up until now, I've only been familiar with using double quotes for episode titles or installments in a bigger series (sometimes).
Edited by BlackFaithStar